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RESEARCH GUIDES

Information Literacy Toolkit: Resource for Teaching Faculty

This guide is intended to support University of Maryland faculty, instructors, and teaching assistants in incorporating information literacy into their courses.

Focus Area

There is no universal set of criteria for a good research question. Different disciplines will have different approaches, requirements, and preferences. However, in general, a good research question will be:

  • Direct and focused. The question should clearly identify what the student is interested in learning about.
  • Open-ended. The question should require more than a "yes" or "no" to answer.  
  • Specific, but not restrictive. The question needs to have an appropriate scope. If the question is too broad, it will be frustrating for students to try to answer the question or find appropriate resources. If it is too narrow, they will struggle to develop a strong argument or find the right resources to answer the question. 
  • Research-able. There are a lot of great, important, and interesting topics that are not appropriate for a research paper. Guide students toward questions that can be researched using the resources available to them at UMD Libraries. 
  • Analytical. A research question should invite analysis and multiple perspectives. Guide students away from research questions that are descriptive (e.g. What is climate change?) and toward topics that invite debate, analysis, and perspective.

Teaching Resources

I only want my students to use scholarly peer-reviewed sources... are the materials in CQ Researcher and Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints peer-reviewed?

Some of the materials in Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints are peer-reviewed and CQ Researcher reports go through an editorial review process. At the beginning of the research process, students are typically not prepared to jump right into scholarly sources. Think about the research articles that you read for your discipline - they are often incredibly specific and require some knowledge of the scholarly conversation at hand to follow the argument.  The resources in CQ Researcher and Gale in Context: Opposing Viewpoints function as a bridge between an idea and the deep scholarly research they will do. They are great for getting ideas for topics, understanding the context of an issue, exploring multiple perspectives, and brainstorming keywords for searching in library databases.